“I’m killing them!” he said thickly. “I’ll get all of them! I’ll kill every one! They made you suffer. They’d have killed you! I’ll get every one—”
Sally smiled tiredly at him. She was utterly exhausted, and she was very weak indeed.
“We’ll have to send word somehow, so they’ll know what. to do if the plague ever shows up anywhere else—”
Ben remembered. Sally was thinking in terms of hope, but there was no hope. He was killing the Things because they had karmed Sally. But the orders he’d overheard a little while back made anything he could do a mere futility. And worse, the plague had already spread from Pharona. A newscast, hours since—he’d hardly noticed it at the time—reported that a Galactic Commission cruiser had landed on Pharona with dispatches for the local sub-commissioner. He could not be cut off from his regular flow of documents to sign! It observed all sanitary precautions. But it did not think to prevent any possibility of bound electric charges entering its metal fabric. So when it went on to Galata it carried the plague, and women were now dying by thousands, and other women by more thou- -sands glowed faintly with cosmic rays coming from their bodies.
Ben told her, his face savagely stern.
“We must tell,” she insisted. “Even if we die, Ben—”
“My dear,” said Ben bitterly, “you know the brass hat mind. The instant we open communication, every ship that’s hunting us will come bouncing here to blast us Out of space. And they’ll find us. If we can get our information to them and on their recorders before we’re killed
why . . . sooner or later, after maybe millions more lives have been lost, the information we’ve given will be passed on as the result of brilliant investigation under the supervision of brass hat so-and-so. But we’ll be dead and disreputable. And we’ll stay disreputable after we’re dead, so that some pompous ass can claim credit for what we’ve found out and get a few more decorations to hang on his fat tummy.”
“Maybe hers,” said Sally. She lay there in the bunk, looking up at Ben with soft eyes. “Some brass hats are women, and a woman brass hat is even worse than a man. You can’t blame them, Ben. They’re important people. They have important posts. So they get dignified and pompous and stupid. If they could only feel that its their work instead of them that’s important—”
“But they never will,” said Ben grimly. “So we die. I pulled down the GC phone to get rid of the Things. I’ll kill off the rest and put the -phone back together. Then I’ll broadcast my stuff, and we’ll sit down and hold hands until we’re killed.”
“Darling!” said Sally wistfully. ‘Would you mind kissing me? You haven’t kissed me but twice since we’ve been together—”
He bent down. He kissed her. And then they clung, suddenly. The little sports cruiser had reeled. Something had hold of it. With a tractorbeam. Ben fought against a savage acceleration, applied from without, and then- there was a violent impact. They had been drawn violently against the hull of a much larger vessel. Tools worked instantly on the air lock, and before Ben could do more than reach the door of the stateroom with his positron-pistol in his hand, he found himself looking into the muzzles of other positron-guns. Navy men faced him.
“You’re under arrest, Sholto,” said a voice crisply. ‘We were ordered to burn you down on sight, but since the plague’s hit Calata, we’ve got instructions to do it before a visiphone screen as a warning to anybody else who has the idea of breaking a planetary quarantine. Come along!”
Brass hat: an idiom accepted as Auxiliary Basic since Circa 2126 Earth Style. It originally referred to the headgear used to distinguish “staff officers” in an army (See ARMY) who gave orders without responsibility for their result, and which they were required to justify only by precedent, “political necessity” or “strategic reasons,”—terms which have no discoverable exact meaning. Costly blunders by officers of the mental pattern AF-IQ-R.37 and its derivatives—(to whom the career of a “staff officer” was irresistibly attractive in time of war)— led to the use of the term “brass hat” to indicate persons of those now-recognized mental patterns. It is an interesting case of instinctive popular recognition of mental patterning before personality analysis emerged from charlatanry.
(Dictionary of Auxiliary Basic Words and Idioms. Cephus, Antres VII. 2215 Earth Style.)
Ben grinned. There was no particular mirth in it, but it was the only possible expression of the way he felt.
“Ah-h-h!” he said softly. “The brass-hat mind in action! The order undoubtedly ended, ‘this order is not to be questioned.’ But try and carry it out! You can kill me, of course. But I’ve a pistol in my hand, too. Try and drag me to a visiphone! And you’ve got a boarding-mike with you, haven’t you? Ah, yes! Everything I say will be recorded and goes through all the ranks of brass hats up to the Galactic Commission, if necessary. Very well! This is a plague ship. I have a girl here who has had the plague and has been cured of it. I know how to cure the plague. But the ship is infected—and so is yours, now! If there are as many as a dozen women on board it, you’ve got a dozen cases of plague in your ship’s company, and you’ve only to set a Geiger counter in front of any one of them—or stand them in the dark—to find it out! What I’ve said is recorded! Now kill me and go and land on any planet in the universe!”
The boarding officer said uncertainly:
“I have orders to take you to a visiphone screen and blast you before it.”
“Try it!” said Ben savagely.
He shook - with fury. Because it seemed that every hope was gone, not only of his own life and Sally’s, but of being able to get past the wall of pompous stupidity brass-hattism had erected. The Space-Navy and all interstellar traffic suffered intolerably from a policy which assumed that infinite wisdom lay in any person with authority to issue an order, and that only blind obedience should be practiced by inferiors.
He raged at himself, too. It was his use of the positron pistol to kill the Things which had led this Navy cruiser directly to him. Pulling Out the GC phone to get its condenser had left him unaware of demands for surrender. His screens had been off. And now he would be killed, and the plague would go all through the galaxy. Because, of - course, brass hats would refuse to believe anything they did not already know, and they would solemnly remove themselves from infected planets-with all sanitary precautions, of course—to exercise their authority elsewhere, and they would spread the plague themselves.
The boarding-officer’s helmet phone hummed. His uncertainty vanished.
“Very good, sir,” he said to the air. To Ben be said, “Your first statements have been checked. Four cases of plague have been found already. You say you can cure them. They will be brought here. The order for your execution is suspended for the time being.”
“I’ll do it,” said Ben curtly, “in the control room.” -
People crowded through the air lock and into the control room. There were four women and a stout and pompous individual with the brass tabs of an under-commissioner. Of brass hat rating—and brass hat mentality.
“You are incredibly insolent!” he puffed. “You have defied the authority of the Galactic Commission! It is unheard of!”
“Also,” said Ben grimly, “I’ve found out how to cure the plague. If you can’t think of anything but my defiance -of authority, you’re a fool!”
The brass hat purpled and gasped. But Ben turned out the lights. The four women, in Space-Navy Auxiliary uniform, stood out starkly in the darkness. Their faces and throats and hands glowed with a pale white light. Ben picked up his condenser. He touched it to the cheek of the first woman, whose features were working convulsively. The glow vanished from her. The little knob glowed instead. Ben held it out and gave it a momentary positron blast. There was the feeling of a soundless scream. He touched the second woman. She no longer glowed. A second blast. A second unheard shriek. The third. When he had drawn the Thing from the fourth woman he did not use the blast upon it. Instead, he turned on the lights.